In this paper, we study optimal monetary policy in an economy where firms’ price-setting decisions are distorted by a signal-extraction problem: they cannot perfectly distinguish aggregate from idiosyncratic shocks based on noisy local information. This systematic misattribution of aggregate shocks to firm-specific factors generates an additional price response, implying that strict price stability is no longer optimal. Instead, the optimal policy fully stabilizes the output gap, which necessarily requires accommodating fluctuations in the price level. The cyclicality of the optimal price level depends on the source of firms’ incomplete information: learning from local demand signals implies a procyclical price level, whereas learning from local productivity signals yields a countercyclical one.
In this paper we propose a production-cost smoothing model with Knightian uncertainty and ambiguity aversion to study the joint behavior of production, inventories, and sales. Our model can explain ten facts that previous studies find difficult to account for simultaneously including the high volatility of production relative to sales, the low ratio of inventory-investment volatility to sales volatility, the positive correlation between sales and inventory investment, and the negative correlation between the inventory-to-sales ratio and sales. Our main results extend to a model of endogenous sales. Finally, we find that the stock-out avoidance motive emerges endogenously in our model, reconciling the long debate in the inventory literature over the production-cost smoothing and stock-out avoidance models.
This paper incorporates ambiguity and information processing constraints into the He and Krishnamurthy (2012) model of intermediary asset pricing. Financial intermediaries possess greater information processing capacity than households. In response, households optimally choose to delegate their investment decisions. The contractual relationship between households and intermediaries is subject to a moral hazard friction, which results in a financial constraint. We show that ambiguity aversion not only amplifies households' incentives to delegate but also tightens the financial constraint. The calibrated model can quantitatively explain both the unconditional and time-varying moments of observed asset prices while endogenously generating an empirically consistent crisis frequency.